Day 1 VMworld EMEA 2012

Today was the first day of VMworld EMEA in Barcelona after yesterdays partner day. The morning kicked off with a keynote by Pat Gelsinger CEO and Steve Herrod. The keynote started the same as VMworld US earlier in the year with live music and drumming coming from the large VMworld 2012 drums.

See the video below

During the keynote there were several announcements mostly around the vCloud Suite management, including VMware vCloud Automation manager which comes from the acquisition of Dynamic Ops.

I really liked the look of this product and it will be interesting to see how in the future it integrates more highly with vCloud director. There were also live demos of vCloud director and its refreshed UI and lots more.

My first session was regarding Zimbra 8 VMware’s mail and collaboration platform. This session was a little basic but gave a good overview of the latest version and the updated UI. I also liked the UC elements that have been integrated utilising partnerships with Mitel and Cisco.

After my first session I headed over to the labs via the solutions exchange hall

My first lab of the day was surrounding vCloud Director, i really enjoyed this lab it gave a good overview not only from and administrators perspective but also as a cloud consumer.

I spent a lot of my time today in the Solutions Exchange hall chatting to many of the companies. Next generation storage has a heavy presence, Tintri, Nimble, Violin Memory and Fusion IO are amongst the ones I have enjoyed learning more about the most. It certainly is becoming and increasingly crowded market place though.

Whilst in the solutions exchange it was good to catch up with Dell and see the new quarter height blades unfortunately the Equallogic storage blade wasn’t on display.

It was also good to catch up with the Embotics and see their latest release of vCommander, they definitely win best USB stick award.

I stopped by the Teradici stand who were displaying a pre release of RDSH utilising PCoIP for a brokered RDS session. This is something that I think some of my customers would use when available. They also had a collection of the now available tera 2 thin clients available including the 4 DVI Wyse P45

Probably my favourite session of VMworld so far was VMware View Storage and Thinking outside the box, covering the usage of local flash based storage to bring down the costs of VDI. Wish one fusion IO card they could comfortably get 200 users per box and 500 when pushing to the Max. They also had a live environment white box for us to connect to and test it.

My final lab of the day was auto deploy where we utilised auto deploy to upgrade a vSphere 5.0 host to 5.1. Most of this was done through the new vSphere web client with the repository configuration etc being completed via Powershell. I haven’t done much with Auto Deploy but compared to my experience with it during previous VMworlds and training courses the improvements in 5.1 seemed to have made it easier to use than ever before.

Day 2 kicks off tomorrow with a second end user computing focused keynote.